The crossing over to Tunisia took only 7 hours on a flat calm sea and the old boat made very fast headway. Tunisia proved quite easy to get into and Tunis was alive and vibrant when we got into it at about 10 pm that night. It had all the newness and wealth of a Middle Eastern city like Jeddah but with a more obviously liberal atmosphere and it was an enjoyable place to eat out at midnight in hot balmy weather though the first hint of humidity allied to very hot weather was beginning to now become apparent.

The road across Tunisia as far as Sfynx was excellent and characterized by a surprising amount of vegetation on all sides. After this we cut inland and the road deteriorated from dual carriageway but remained good and as we cut through more desert landscape the temperature began to soar.

Our hotel in Gades was a delightful place with a beautiful pool and even though the town itself is an industrial port this place by the beach proved an oasis of peace with an old world charm about it, the ideal sort of place to relax in. The humidity was now very high at this stage of the trip and though we had yet to see rain there were drops that threatened here and fell sporadically into the pool causing an effect to all the world like fish rings on a still river on a summers night. What stands out in my mind about Tunisia was cattle by the side of the motorway attended by men wearing traditional straw hats that I had remembered seeing in encyclopedias from the 1900's and which seemed not to have dated since Roman times.